MTV Sports: T.J. Lavin's Ultimate BMX

Another extreme sports rider bails out and bites it hard on the Game Boy Color.

It's not a good sign when Extreme Sports with the Berenstain Bears is one of the better extreme sports game out this year. Ever since Tony Hawk, publishers have been tripping over their toys trying to get anybody to make them a skateboarding / biking / surfing / street luge game -- anything where you can tag the word "grind" on the back of the box. Too bad so few of these companies have ever even taken a ride on a skateboard or BMX bike, because it shows in their games. It's like those kids at the mall that try doing an kick-flip or axle grind without even knowing how to ollie -- to be good, you've got to have the basics. But they keep trying and trying...

What's wrong with this game isn't its general control, although the developers at Handheld Games had just as much trouble trying to get tight handling out of a 3/4 perspective in an extreme sports game as anybody else has. Turning and maintaining that twitch control is a burden when the screen is crowded with ramps, fun boxes, and half-pipes. And being on a bike instead of a slim skateboard, that trouble is doubled in BMX games. There's no compensation for the controls, so bikers will get stuck in corners or turn too sharp for ramps and stack on themselves. Sometimes the control tries to be automatic, such as popping up stairs, but then its handling of transition ramps and leaps just bomb out instead of taking over for the player. And overall, the game is too simple in controls -- only 9 stunts plus a bunny hop, and no grinds or flatland stunts. Getting air is fun, but that's not all there is to BMX.

In attempts to go quantity over quality, the developers added three types of gameplay -- street, vert, and dirt. The variety in the tracks isn't much, especially since there are no specialized street tricks or grinds to beef up the street and vert tracks, and the dirt courses are all the same two basic ramps that don't allow much room to mix up the stunts. They would have been better off with a Big Air competition like in the X-Games, with only three ramps and much more speed on your side to prove yourself. The game's engine unfortunately doesn't have the power to really mix it up in the street courses, with only a few platforms and ramps, and oddly, even little ramps have the potential to pop riders off with as much height as a full half-pipe. And the game's final proving ground is simply a really long half-pipe with no transitional gaps or trick bumps -- it simply takes longer to ride the flat part of the ramp. How weak.

The real trouble here, however, is in the handling of the trick system and point scale. The game is loaded with huge "Money Moves" that, like Madden's "Money Plays," always work and yield gigantic gains. Between the programmers and the art staff, there seems to have been no collaboration, because some of the biggest scoring moves, like the Front Flip and No Hander, also have the shortest animations. Perhaps the point values are supposed to be based on the difficulty of doing the trick in real life (it sort of makes sense -- a Back Flip is worth less than a Front Flip), but in the game, it's just a matter of tapping a button and a direction, and since there's no penalty in the animation, the easiest moves to land are worth mega-points. It's like if a Kick Flip were worth as much as a 900 in Tony Hawk.

These Money Moves could have been lessened if the game was balanced, but against all reason, there's no penalty for staying with one trick over and over. Tony Hawk penalized a stale routine harshly, but in T.J. Lavin, you can pull off Superman grabs until the crowd grows beards, and you'll still be the judge's fave. So instead of the challenge being a test of how cleanly and how mixed you can turn in a technical run, the purpose of playing this game is simply trying to rack up as many No Handers as you can in a single swing. Also foolishly missing is any bonus for holding a grab or plant move. Just pop as quick as possible and go for another move right afterwards. The developers didn't even add bonus points for a combo -- except for the tough 540, none of the stunts award bonus points for training tricks together. And though it's a feather in your cap for landing a 1260, the point value isn't nearly worth 9 No Handers, so why bother?

This lack of attention to detail unfortunately shakes out in the graphics as well. Although the basic graphics are sharp and animated smoothly, when it comes to the gameplay, the visuals do some funny things that make it look faked. Some stunts are rushed, such as the flips that seemingly defy gravity when the rider suddenly stops in mid-air and twists fully before the bike begins to fall to the ground again. Often, the rider comes down with his front wheel tipped 45 degrees wrong, but he'll still land the trick. Stunts can only be performed once a bike has flipped and is working its way down, so half the hangtime is wasted because there isn't enough animation to go across the entire jump. There also aren't many tricks in the book, and one -- the Superman Seat Grab -- is repeated with the same animation and just a different name slapped on [standard Seat Grab].

The Verdict

There are moments of dull fun to this game before you stumble on the money plays, but even if you have the willpower to ignore these cop-out easy cash stunts, the control isn't enough fun to stick with it. MTV Sports: T.J. Lavin's Ultimate BMX should have been a quick pick-up game for a few runs, but there's not much going on in the tracks, there aren't enough stunts to give variety, and there's a burdening password needed to get access your stats (which is absolutely ridiculous since there are only four simplistic upgrades for the bike anyway -- none of which are explained in the manual -- so why such a long code when there's so little to keep track of?) T.J. may dominate on his own two wheels, but he's a rookie on the Game Boy Color. This game needs a lot more practice, and should learn some more from some of the better riders before trying to play with the pros.